A grainy image of his face drew comparisons to Hollywood heartthrobs. A jacket similar to the one he’s wearing on wanted posters is reportedly flying off the shelves. And the words written on the bullets he used to kill a man in cold blood on a sidewalk on Wednesday have become, for some people, a rallying cry.

Four days after a gunman assassinated a top health insurance executive in Midtown Manhattan and vanished, the unidentified suspect has, in some quarters, been venerated as something approaching a folk hero.

  • Olhonestjim@lemmy.world
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    3 days ago

    If an awful person ends their life doing something heroic rather than villainous, maybe they can be remembered for that instead. Maybe not. Probably the circumstances will be complicated in how they are weighed.

    As for this fellow, I feel somewhat confident that the public will not accept whatever person they pin the blame upon as The Adjuster or Spartacus or whatever we call him, alive or dead. They cannot be trusted, so he cannot be caught. He’s well on his way to myth.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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      3 days ago

      I’m just talking about the heartthrob part. Don’t fall in love with someone you know next to nothing about.

      • Olhonestjim@lemmy.world
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        3 days ago

        Ah but we’ll never know for certain who he is! If they can’t find the real guy, they’ll likely pin it on some nobody with a problematic past. So we can’t fall in love with the real guy, but only a hero archetype instead. And that’s perfectly fine.

        • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          That makes no sense. If they don’t catch the real guy, he’ll be free to do it again. If he does it again, it will be clear that the nobody they pinned it on was the wrong person.

          • Olhonestjim@lemmy.world
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            3 days ago

            We do not trust the oligarchs and their police to actually catch the real guy. There’s a good chance that, whoever they kill and claim to have “got him!” the public will not accept that they really did. We already think they’re going to just murder someone in order to close the case. Maybe they’ll get him for real. Maybe they won’t. We will never know and the conspiracy theory machine will just keep churning out maybes.

            If another CEO bites the dust, it will probably be a copycat. This guy is getting away, if not in actual truth, at least in folklore. He’d be a fool to strike again.

            • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              Again, that makes no sense. We know what he looks like and surveillance cameras are everywhere. Are you suggesting the copycat would somehow do some sort of Face/Off thing with the killer?

              • Olhonestjim@lemmy.world
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                3 days ago

                We have no idea what he looks like. The pictures are of a guy with a different jacket. They’re the ones who claim that’s the guy, and handsome white dudes are a dime a dozen in the city. There’s still no reason to trust they showed us the right guy.

                  • Olhonestjim@lemmy.world
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                    3 days ago

                    Dude. I’m not saying one way or the other. I’m just saying that the conspiracy machine is gonna churn up reasons why they might have lied, no matter who they pin it on.

                    You think they’ve finally let the jet fuel steel beams go after all these years? There’s no reason why the conspiracy machine is ever gonna accept that they got the right guy. Your insistence that it makes no sense is utterly irrelevant to conspiracy theorists.